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Forum: Credit cards welcome at Star City – Zvyozdny, where Britain’s first astronaut will be trained

By STEVE CONNOR

THE poster hanging on the wall of the Intourist Hotel said it was the
first opportunity for foreign holidaymakers to see Zvyozdny, or Star City,
a closed Russian town where the USSR trains its cosmonauts.

Intourist, the state tourist organisation in the USSR, promised that
the first commercial tour of the town, which is heavily guarded against
uninvited guests, would be a ‘unique opportunity’. A chance to visit the
town where Britain’s first astronaut will be trained seemed too good to
miss, although the price of a couple of tickets, Pounds sterling 105, made
me wince. Never mind, Intourist now takes credit cards.

The price was probably the reason why there were not many takers for
the day trip. There were four in our English-speaking group, and about half-a-dozen
space fanatics in a German group, an ironic twist given that the Soviet
space programme owes so much to German scientists captured at the end of
the Second World War.

We set off by bus in the bright sunshine of the early morning and were
introduced to Luba, our Intourist guide. About 10 kilometres from Star City,
our driver stopped to give his papers to a police checkpoint. A few minutes
later we were passing through more checkpoints.

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After waiting a few minutes while Luba remonstrated with officials on
our arrival (they were not apparently all that sure who we were), we finally
passed the last checkpoint before entering the city itself. City is perhaps
a misnomer. It is in fact a town covering an area of about 300 hectares,
with about 4000 residents, and about another 2000 commuting each day from
Moscow.

We all walked to the first port of call, a huge statue of Yuri Gagarin,
the first man in space and definitely the greatest hero of Star City, if
not the USSR, next to Lenin. Gagarin, Luba said, had lived in a flat on
the sixth floor of the block in front of us.

From the statue of a late Hero of the Soviet Union, we went to meet
a live one, in the shape of Colonel Vyatcheslav Zudov, who had the medals
to prove it. He stepped out of his car to be immediately mobbed by an admiring
group of Germans, who appeared to know every detail of his last trip into
space. This was in 1975 when he had to come back to Earth prematurely as
a result of a failure to dock with his rendezvous. Zudov handled the adulation
well. He kept his dignity as he posed for a continual series of photographs,
shaking hands with Hans from Munich and Klaus from Baden-Baden.

We stepped inside the Space Centre, a large building that houses a number
of exhibits of the USSR’s achievements in space. We saw a Vostok capsule,
in which the first men in space spent a cramped few hours circling the globe.
‘They saw the sun rise and fall 17 times a day,’ Luba said. As if that was
not disorientating enough, the cosmonauts had to cope with extraordinary
hardships and the constant fear of sudden, or even lingering death. No wonder
they had to be athletes as well as extremely brave.

One exhibition at the Space Centre is devoted solely to Gagarin. He
was the first man to orbit the Earth, in 1961 at the age of 27. Just seven
years later he died tragically in a plane crash. If he had had just two
more seconds to correct his aircraft, he could have survived, Luba explained.
The exhibition includes the wristwatch and wallet he was carrying when he
died, and a picture of him meeting Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

During the walk from the Space Centre to the part of the city where
cosmonauts are trained, I asked Luba why the Soviet authorities had now
decided to allow foreign tourists into Star City. ‘Glasnost, openness,’
she said, perhaps a little wary of my questioning. ‘We’ve got to get rid
of the bureaucracy and red tape.’ Of course, the other reason is the Soviet
Union’s need to earn foreign ‘hard’ currency. At Pounds sterling 52.50 a
ticket, a guided tour of Star City could be a nice little earner for Intourist.

To get into the training area, we had to pass through another guarded
gate. Once inside, we could see a huge circular building where the cosmonauts
are spun in a centrifuge at high speeds to simulate the very high g forces
they experience at lift-off.

In another building, which we entered, there is a full-scale model of
the Mir space station. Zudov was on hand to explain how the model is used
in training as he posed for photographs next to a suit used for walking
in space. He had a gripping story about how one cosmonaut had inadvertently
knocked a handle on his suit only to find that he was slowly losing pressure.
Zudov told the tale with the aplomb of a veteran.

After a closer look at the Mir, and another round of photographs, we
were off to see the last building on the tour. This was where the cosmonauts
train in a large tank of water to simulate weightlessness. We peered through
the portholes to see a Soviet space capsule immersed in the watery blue
light of the tank.

All training sessions in the tank start with a medical check-up. Then
the cosmonauts put on their heat-exchange suits, which keep them at the
right temperature, followed by the bulky outer suits. To prepare for any
one mission in space, the cosmonauts spend between 7 and 18 sessions training
in the water tank.

The final port of call was the restaurant, where we had coffee and cakes
but somehow missed out on the main course. One of the problems of being
a tourist in the USSR is that you never seem to be able to eat when you
want to. Let’s hope that Britain’s prospective astronauts, who will spend
up to 18 months at Zryozdny, have more luck.